Who Benefits From Green Cities?

In many large cities around the world, the public and private investors that promote the environmental, socio-economic and health benefits of urban greening projects hide the often highly inequitable outcomes of gentrification and displacement linked to these developments. Under the banners of sustainability, resilience and climate adaptation, a number of municipalities engaged in greening trajectories, instead of solving problems, have created new socio-spatial inequities or even exacerbated old ones.

In a recent article citing the High Line as the most famous example of this phenomenon, Scott Kratz, project director of Washington D.C.’s 11^th Street Bridge Park, expressed concerns early on over the social impacts of the new highway-bridge-cum-park. “Who is this really for?” he asks himself. The question is a crucial one. Who are the real targets and beneficiaries of new or restored green amenities in cities?

As exemplified by the High Line in New York City, the formerly elevated railroad transformed into a large urban areal park now visited by 5 million people each year, many new parks have ultimately catered to white and socially-privileged residents and tourists. This green transformation has been followed by spikes in local property values and by the displacement of nearby businesses and working-class-residents pushed out by rising rental prices. Between 2003 and 2011, property values near the High Line went up by 103%, and Zaha Hadid’s studio penthouses currently go for $50 million.

Rendering of The Highline by Kerry James Marshall

Since the XIXth century, urban greening projects such as parks, gardens, greenways and ecological corridors have been promoted as motors of beautification, improved health outcomes, neighborhood revitalization, and residential well-being. Yet we can observe a significant shift in green urban planning—from the community-oriented greening of the 1970s and 1980s aimed at reclaiming neighborhoods, toward a development-oriented greening aimed at attracting high-end amenities that cater to service industries, technology districts, privileged residents, and tourists.

Our research at BCNUEJ has found evidence of this in various cities across the globe. In Medellin, the greening of poor areas in the name of growth control, beautification, and resilience is transforming low-income areas into landscapes of pleasure and privilege. In the process of green infrastructure construction such as the Greenbelt – Cinturón Verde, many residents of low-income neighborhoods are being dispossessed of community assets like land, social capital, and traditional farming practices. In New Orleans, we have observed how new green infrastructure linked to climate adaptation and its Living with Water plan mostly aim to attract a new creative, white middle class that can afford to purchase newly built waterfront property, while overlooking long-term inequities in land use development and promoting the creation of ecological enclaves. In Barcelona, our pilot study (download the full version here) found clear green gentrification trends in several historically underserved areas, especially old industrial neighborhoods. In the Sant Martí district, for instance, the percentage of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by nearly 28% on average around a new local park, versus only a 7.6% increase for the district as a whole over a period of 10 years. The data clearly demonstrates how new green space attracts higher-educated residents.

Green Belt, Medellín, Colombia

Such far-reaching dynamics raises questions for environmental justice groups. As activists organize around improving urban environmental quality for socially-vulnerable residents, they are increasingly faced with the inequitable outcomes associated with greening projects promoted by powerful private investors and municipal decision-makers under a utopian language of sustainability and quality of life. So much so, that the growing trend of land revaluation and displacement that often results from greening has earned itself the term green gentrification or environmental gentrification, in which gentrification is characterized by the social erasure of residential practices as well as by real physical displacement.

Illustration by Lapin

At BCNUEJ, our long-term research asks: Do urban greening projects have win-win outcomes for urban residents, as municipal leaders and planners widely claim? Or do they benefit some groups more than others? To what extent do different green planning interventions translate into the creation or exacerbation of new environmental inequalities through new dynamics of exclusion and invisibilization? Through our research project GREENLULUS—Green Locally Unwanted Land Uses—we examine the conditions of this green space paradox in different cities and its implications for long-term marginalized urban residents. We use the terms ‘GREENLULUS’ and ‘green space paradox’ to describe new or restored green amenities in historically marginalized communities as a way repoliticizing a post-political sustainability discourse and to point to the fact that green projects do not always—and in fact, seldomly—bring positive outcomes for all city dwellers.

Of course we do not think the solution is to avoid greening in low-income neighborhoods or communities of color. Such decisions would further exclude historically marginalized groups from the benefits of greening and concentrate green or sustainability investment in richer neighborhoods. Nor do we argue that planners intentionally target low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in order to profit developers and exclude vulnerable residents from the benefits of green projects. Our research points to the fact that planners are more likely to neglect the impacts of their plans on the exchange values of real estate and that they are often imprisoned in a logic of competitive urbanism and city rebranding even if they are becoming increasingly aware of the inequitable impacts of green planning.

How can cities craft regulations, policies, planning schemes, funding mechanisms, and partnerships that address the negative impacts of green planning? While we and other experts suggest possible solutions to the green gentrification problem and communities begin to learn from the mistakes of cases like the High Line, cities need to keep asking themselves: How can everyone benefit from green cities?